President Obama's Disturbing Criminalization Of The Private Sector

New York Stock Exchange. "In the 2012 presidential elections, the free market will sadly be on trial. " (Photo credit: Mike_fleming)

Remember when an open microphone caught President Barack Obama asking Russia’s leaders for “space” until after the election in November? If the president had asked for political advice instead, the Kremlin’s keepers might have sketched out a strategy that looked remarkably like the one Obama’s campaign executed last week.

In a conference call with reporters, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter suggested that presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney could have committed a “felony” by lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission about the nature of his role at Bain Capital after leaving the private equity firm in 1999.

While even members of the more liberally inclined mainstream media have debunked these allegations, one fact has emerged: The man whom the Constitution charges with executing the laws of the United States doesn’t take his responsibility particularly seriously. How else to explain why Obama would give political advisers permission to freelance in law enforcement?

As much as one would like to dismiss Cutter’s remarks as mindless ramblings from the campaign trail, they are hard to ignore given that her boss oversees the Department of Justice. They are even harder to ignore because Obama stood behind her words despite Romney’s demands for an apology.

The controversy comes just a couple months after the Obama campaign’s “Truth Team” (quotation marks required) launched a web page branding certain donors to the Romney campaign as criminals. “A closer look at Romney’s donors reveals a group of wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records,” the team reported. “Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law.”

But scrolling through the web page, as Kimberley Strassel of The Wall Street Journal carefully did, turns up no criminals. The “Truth Team” has conflated being on the wrong side of the law with being on the wrong side of Obama’s agenda. In many cases, the campaign sleuths merely dug up evidence of business leaders making business decisions to outsource jobs, which, as of this writer’s deadline, remained legal.

Three and a half years into Obama’s presidency, these attacks should come as a surprise to no one. In diatribes against the financial sector and populist rants about oil, he has shown a disturbing tendency, almost a desire, to criminalize business for political ends.

When too much time elapses after a financial crisis with too few prosecutions, Obama pledges to expand investigations. In his State of the Union this January, he announced plans for a special unit that “will hold accountable those who broke the law” because surely someone broke the law. Naïve is the word for anyone who thinks that a president with Obama’s economic record would understand that good people – homeowners, bankers, investors and, yes, government regulators – can sometimes make very bad economic decisions with the best of intentions.

When oil prices rise, Obama seeks to score political points by blaming a shadowy network of speculators, who make for convenient scapegoats. In a speech this April, he promised to stop speculators from hurting “consumers by illegally manipulating or rigging the energy markets for their own gain” even as he gestured toward the real but less convenient cause of higher prices – supply and demand.

Given this president’s record of assuming the worst about the private sector, Romney cannot afford to waste time waiting for an apology, no matter how deserved. What’s on trial this election is larger than one man’s business record. What’s on trial is the free market, and those who believe in it must defend it.

Jonathan Horn was a speechwriter and special assistant for President George W. Bush. He is now the President and CEO of Jonathan Horn Communications, LLC and a senior strategist at Oval Office Writers, LLC. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathandhorn.

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